Wyvern's population
 

This might just be my imagination but has anyone else noticed that every once in a while the total number of players online gets to 3 and below. This isn't just during the night either, I've seen this happen in the moning and even mid-day.

Although a while ago I would have cheered at the chance to rampage every area out there without any interruptions, with all the recent nerfes I can understand why everyone is loosing interest.

So whats everyone opinion on the matter? Will this continue on. will the game loose its appeal? Or is this just a temporary recession?

This was actually talked about in-game at one point but you probably weren't present at the time. anyway, I bet it will only be a temporary recession. It could be that school's out and theres graduation for some people, another could be that people are going on vacation and won't have internet access for a while, also some people may just want to wait out the changes and let them settle a bit before playing again. I dont think its because people are losing interest or wyvern is losing appeal.

Well it is summer break, so people may have just went on vacations, or just went outside >_>. But from what I recall of earlier summer breaks (long since past) people crowded the server with 100-130+ online during mid-day and around 30-40 at midnight-early morning (12-5am), that was when having 90 people online on average was common during the year. Now it barely reaches 20 during the day and 3+/- during the night.

Though, I have to admit, as much as I love having the whole server to myself I haven't really been very motivated to actually take advantage of the situation lately

The one summer (2003) where we reached 100 players online a lot (not 130) was at the peak of Rhialto's efforts to improve server performance in a push to be able to support hundreds of players online at once. It was a steady progression that you can track in the news archive (a bit) if you weren't aware of what was going on behind the scenes at the time and it began to drop after Rhialto stopped working on that and issues began to build up that went unresolved.

Right now we're in a transitional period where ups and down are to be expected. But we're going to keep working and at some point we will get to a place where you will not only see a growth in the playerbase, but you will find that the playerbase has become more stable. We have a lot of work to do to get there and a large part of the problem (that hasn't even addressed yet) has to do with sever stability - As things stand, the server just cannot handle that many players online at once without lag.

In the previous years, around this time more people played. Everytime I'm on there are about 15 to 20 players on. Right now there are about 8. This same time of the year and night a few years ago, maybe even last year, there would have been around 40. It's only been getting worse. The "Who's online" feature should get taken off the website because it's just embarrasing lol.
If I was interested in playing this game and saw that only 8 people were on I would probably lose incentive to play.

That's really okay. We're not in a place right now where we're trying to rebuild the playerbase. We have a lot of work to do, some of which will be jarring, and when we're done, we will start concerning ourselves with the state of the playerbase. Which we will do both by getting Wyvern's name out there and by focusing our updates on things that will attract new and old players alike.

In the meantime, you'll probably see the playerbase shoot up and down on its own. A little bit after we first started our work, the numbers online shot up 40 players at peak hours (before it was 20-30) and now the opposite is taking place. Such is life when making a lot of dramatic changes in a row. Sometimes you get bunches of updates that people really like, sometimes you get bunches of updates that people need to take time to adapt to. The last time Wyvern had arch wizards actively working on the game like this was in 2004, so there's no way to really get around that as there's a lot to be done.

Btw, it's only a half hour after your claim of there being 8 players online and when I went to check there were now 17.

Hah..I really respect the dedication you wizards have concerning this game. Seriously. Maybe all this game needs is better advertisement. I know about it because I saw it on arcadepod.com's best rated games a long time ago, and I hated runescape. Right now it seems that the only way people will find out about this game is word of mouth.

Personally I'm glad arch wizards are finally working on the core coding. It's the first time I've seen it since the entire time I've played (it's weird to say but I'm somewhat of an oldie now) and being an oldie and seeing core code worked on for the first time is a great improvement on the game and I can't wait to see the advertisement in store for this game. If a pure text based game can attract a large player base. I can see this one grabbing even more. Personally the way I see this getting the most players is if Contrare can make the client into a facebook application.

Eww, THAT many players...

Oh, just what we need. A bunch of foul-mouthed, facebook dweebs.

I'll pass.

agreed, i definitely think facebook application is a really bad idea. not to denigrate your efforts and thought, its just that there are too many people that have the potential to ruin a really great game. hopefully only the genuine rpg-ers and those willing to adapt will come to this game.

And besides, the new Facebook sucks... SUCKS... :P

Also, a lot of people may not appeal anyways to 2D Dungeon-ey games... seeing a lot of the "New" games are 3D... oh, there's also... Runescape... :/

There are some exceptions to the above opinion though... :S

3D games have their own drawbacks, requiring a decent system to play one is a bit of a hassle, not to mention they tend to be prone to crashes and severe bugs. A lightweight client with a simple kill-or-be-killed DnD MMO is a nice change of pace. Though the game is starting to go into an unpleasant direction, aiming less at "see how many things you kill before you get killed" to "lets see how long you can survive, ...no gold for you!". >_>

RS is garbage.

How is "see how many things you can kill before you get killed" different from "lets see how long you can survive"?

Because the latter encourages running without fighting.

Facebook Wyvern....ewwww :(

We all know Jacksparrow was joking.

he was joking? *puts away torch and pitchfork* now you ruined my whole day, ok guys, lets go *the angry mob leaves while grumbling about the unfairness of it all*

Wyvern doesnt need advertising, it is fine just the way it is. Just tell your trusted friends about it, or in Salkand's case your imaginary bunny.

I can't say I'm very surprised that the population for this kind of a game is low. The game is pretty hardcore and geared towards players who have more of an imagination. Unlike World of Warcraft where the world is graphically rendered right in front of your face, Wyvern challenges the player to find the enjoyment in their playtime and indulge themselves in the community. Some people find that very uncomfortable and dismiss it outright. For some reason I keep finding my way back to playing Wyvern every now and then, and as of recently I've altogether quit World of Warcraft. I can honestly say that WoW has very little appeal left whatsoever. Wyvern however has endured, and kept my interest due to the flexible nature of the game. Anyways I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents about the population of the game, not that anyone cares about my interests or game style preferences. In my opinion, I'd rather have 8 close friends playing a fairly open game such as DnD or Wyvern than continuously farming Naxxramas or Ulduar week in and week out with 24 other people that I could care less about.

EDIT: Something else worth mentioning is that the developers for Wyvern care a whole lot more than the WoW developers, especially in the wake of the Activision-Blizzard merger.